SpaceX almost died in 2008.
Yesterday, it IPOâd at a $1.77 trillion valuation.
That single sentence may be one of the greatest business stories ever told.
Hereâs how Elon Musk went from three failed rockets to the largest IPO in history and becoming the worldâs first trillionaire.
In 1999, Elon sold Zip2 for roughly $300 million.
A few years later, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, leaving Musk with around $180 million.
Most people would have disappeared onto a yacht.
Elon chose Mars.
After looking into buying rockets from Russia and realizing how absurdly expensive they were, he decided to do something almost nobody believed was possible:
Build rockets himself.
In 2002, SpaceX was born inside a warehouse in El Segundo, California.
Musk poured about $100 million of his own money into the company and hired young engineers willing to work insane hours, move fast, and question everything the aerospace industry had accepted for decades.
They built in-house.
They took risks.
They failed loudly.
And for a while, it looked like the critics were right.
Falcon 1 failed on its first launch in 2006.
Then it failed again in 2007.
Then it failed a third time in August 2008 when the first and second stages collided after separation.
At the same time, Tesla was fighting for survival during the financial crisis.
Musk was running out of money.
SpaceX was running out of chances.
Tesla was running out of time.
Most founders would have folded.
Elon split what was left of his fortune between both companies and bet everything on one final launch.
On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 Flight 4 lifted off from Omelek Island.
This time, it reached orbit.
SpaceX became the first privately funded company to send a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit.
Three months later, NASA awarded SpaceX a Commercial Resupply Services contract worth more than $1 billion.
The company was saved.
But survival was only the beginning.
SpaceX went on to build Falcon 9, which became the most frequently launched rocket in the world.
It drove launch costs down dramatically.
It landed a rocket booster when the industry said reusable rockets were unrealistic.
It turned rocket landings from a viral internet moment into routine operations.
In 2020, SpaceX sent NASA astronauts to orbit aboard Crew Dragon, becoming the first private company to put humans into space on its own spacecraft.
Then came Starlink.
A satellite internet network that now serves millions of people globally and has become one of SpaceXâs most important businesses.
Launches. Satellites. Internet. Reusability. Human spaceflight.
SpaceX did not just enter the aerospace industry.
It rewrote the economics of it.
Now Musk is pushing into the next frontier: space-based AI infrastructure.
With Starship, SpaceX is trying to build the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket needed to launch massive payloads at a scale no other company can currently match.
The long-term vision is bigger than rockets.
It is Mars.
It is global internet.
It is AI compute in orbit.
It is making space an economic layer of civilization.
Yesterday, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under
$SPCX at a $1.77 trillion valuation.
The IPO became the largest in history.
Elon Muskâs SpaceX stake alone is now worth hundreds of billions, pushing his net worth beyond $1 trillion.
The worldâs first trillionaire.
But the most insane part?
This entire story almost ended in 2008.
Three failed launches.
Two companies near bankruptcy.
One final rocket.
One impossible bet.
And a founder who refused to quit.
SpaceX started with a warehouse, $100 million, and a mission most people laughed at.
Today, it is one of the most valuable companies on Earth.
History will remember this as one of the greatest comeback stories in business.